Issue 134

Wominjeka, kia ora or welcome to Connections, issue 134, in whatever language you relate to.

I can’t speak for everyone but personally Term 2 passed by in a blur of speeding light and sound, and then just like that, we are into Term 3 and on the home straight for 2025.Term 2 has been extremely busy for us as we attended five conferences, completed the 2025 SCIS customer survey and started the SCIS Data discovery project.

SCIS on the road in Term 2

Over the past couple of months, the SCIS bus* has travelled far and wide across Australia, as well as venturing to the UK, engaging with our customers.

Our travels started in Canberra for the Teacher Librarian Professional Learning Community conference, in mid-May. The conference theme was Capitalising on non-fiction in a digital age. SCIS’s Cataloguing Team Lead, Ceinwen Jones, represented SCIS and presented our non-fiction digital collections.

Did you know that SCIS cataloguers curate collections of digital resources that can be downloaded from scisdata.com/ collections? If you would like to learn more you can read our Connections article in issue 129 or watch our free webinar recording: Free digital collection in SCIS.

The SCIS team then took the relatively short drive down the Princes Hwy from Melbourne to the GMHBA Stadium in Geelong for the biennial Australian School Library Association (ASLA) conference. For Australian rules fans, particularly those who barrack for the (small) cats (that is, not the Tigers), having a conference at a Geelong stadium was a bonus.

The beautiful and informative Welcome to Country by Wadawurrung man Ashleigh Skinner set the scene for the sharing knowledge, culture and ideas. The conference theme was Energise/Empower/ Explore, which was exemplified by Geelong Grammar School Principal Rebecca Cody. Her inspirational opening keynote was an authentic and honest account of her values and her journey to her current role.

Sometimes when the bar is set so high at the beginning of an event, it can be hard for those following to live up to the standard set but this wasn’t the case. Every session and presentation was engaging and interesting.

The conference also saw the 2025 library professionals award winners named, and congratulations must go to to Claire Elliott, School Library Professional of the Year; Marianne Grasso, Library Advocate; and Diana Brien, Early Career Teacher Librarian, all of whom exemplify all the wonderful qualities required to inspire learners and school communities.

Directly following ASLA, SCIS headed to the leafy north-west of Sydney to the Australian Christian school library network conference at the Mary MacKillop Spirituality Ministry Centre. SCIS hadn’t previously attended this conference but it proved to be another wonderful opportunity to connect about all things school library and SCIS.

SCIS's Program Director (Product, Data and Insights) Colin McNeil attended the School Library Association (UK) weekend course in Northampton in England. The theme of the conference was Breaking Barriers: Freedom to Learn.

The conference was a fantastic opportunity to meet with some of our 1000+ customers in the UK and learn more about how we can better support them, and calaloguing needs specific to the UK. Thanks to AccessIt for welcoming SCIS to share their stand and highlight what SCIS offers our joint subscribers.

The final conference we attended in Term 2 was the School Library Association of South Australia. I didn’t think that the opening of the ASLA conference could be outdone but Minister for Education, Training and Skills of South Australia, Blair Boyer, managed this. He recognised the essential work that school library staff do supporting better outcomes for students. He also expressed the connection between digital literate students and the fight against mis- and dis-information, and how welltrained school library staff are essential for addressing this. It will be interesting to see if he and the department are open to funding training for school library staff and ensuring that school libraries in South Australian government schools have trained library staff.

As well as a wonderful opening address the conference included engaging presentations and workshops, lively discussion and many opportunities to engage with school library staff engage with school library staff, many of whom have come to libraries from very different backgrounds.

SCIS looks forward to discussing how our services deliver efficiencies which free up time for library staff for student-facing activities, provide access to additional digital contents and support better student outcomes, with school library staff at conferences in Term 3.

SCIS 2025 customer survey

Thank you to the 1,101 SCIS customers who completed the 2025 SCIS customer survey. We appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback on what SCIS does well and how we can further support school libraries to deliver better outcomes for students and school colleagues in the future.

One quick top-line statistic from the survey, SCIS’s net promoter score** has risen from 63.1 in 2024 to 65.3 in 2025. This tells us that you appreciate the improvements that we’re making to SCIS, although we won’t be resting on our laurels.

In the Term 4 edition of Connections, we’ll provide more insights from the feedback we received in the survey and how we’ll be using this as part of our discovery process.

SCIS discovery process

Towards the end of Term 2, we started an exciting project which will see major improvements to how SCIS delivers our services and how users interact with SCIS. data.com. Some of our discovery process will be based on what you have told us through our last two customer surveys but we will also be engaging with customers throughout.

We thank all customers and partners for their input into this process. It will be extremely exciting to see the results of this work and sharing this with you in the future.

We look forward to working with you in Term 3 and catching up at even more conferences. Thank you for being part of the SCIS community, and we hope you enjoy this issue of Connections.